Information technology (“IT”) departments and data centers attempting to consolidate servers by using virtualization technologies face challenges such as which servers should be migrated to a virtualized environment (i.e., virtualized). Virtualization is a technology that can be leveraged to achieve benefits such as reduced IT infrastructure costs and increased quality and agility of IT infrastructure. Virtualization enables execution of multiple operating systems concurrently on a single physical server, where each of the operating systems runs as a self-contained computing device or virtual machine. Hypervisors carry out time- and cost-saving tasks through virtual machines in virtualized environments with advanced levels of scalability, manageability and reliability.
Typically, not all computing devices within, for example, a data center are migrated to virtualized environments (or virtualized). Rather, system administrators observe or monitor the utilization level of computing devices (e.g., servers) and determine which computing devices should be virtualized. Manually identifying the computing devices that are candidates for virtualization (i.e., which computing devices can benefit from virtualization) from hundreds or thousands of computing devices can be a tedious, inefficient, and time-consuming task.
This task can be simplified by tools that allow system administrators to view present or current utilization values of many computing devices within, for example, a data center. However, such known tools fail to provide systems administrators with information related to the utilization of computing devices during various past time periods. In other words, the system administrators using such known tools have limited visibility into the history of the utilization of the computing devices. Thus, system administrators typically determine which computing devices are candidates for virtualization by observing utilization values provided by such known tools and manually accessing historic utilization information.